https://www.google.be/maps/place/Baarle-Hertog/
This is a Belgian city enclave within the Netherlands with enclaves of the Netherlands within its borders
Someone also tried to tell me Norwood, Ohio is the largest city within a city (an enclave city), but I can't find a source on that anywhere.
Really great video by Tom Scott about Baarle Hertog
If we discount natural borders like the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica borders only Los Angeles and has twice as many residents.
https://www.amazon.com/City-Random-House-Readers-Circle/dp/0...
Some houses in the town of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau are divided between the two countries. At one time, according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border this simply meant that the customers had to move to a table on the Belgian side.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/02/enclaves_betwe...
[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3378842/Belgium-Neth...
Belgium should have 3
I suspect what's really going on, psychologically, is that Turkey looks much more like a rectangle than it does any other basic shape: I would never described Macedonia as rectangular, despite its considerable overlap, because it's "oval." Kenya's a pentagon before it's anything else, and so on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/300b86/portugal...
Here's an archived copy: https://archive.is/cRkgb
Those kinds of borders are quite common and I've always thought they say a lot about a country and its past.
This is one of the main reasons why a lot of central Africa is a shit show politically. Most of the modern borders were drawn during the colonial era without much consideration as to which tribes and city-states ended up in which countries, so there's not a strong relationship between "nations" (i.e. culturally similar groups of people) and "countries" (i.e. demarcated stretches of land) like there is in most of the rest of the world.
http://everything2.com/title/Never+Trust+a+Straight+Line+on+...
I'd like to see it compared with a "parallelogramness" measure, based on rotating calipers. Rectangularity would be a special case.
To me, Egypt doesn't look very rectangular at all. The very deep concave section, and the sharp convex portion at the bottom right completely break rectangularity for me.
I'm also curious as to why Nauru seems to have such sharp, straight borders - it looks more like the Vatican than a Pacific island.
Regarding Nauru, I think that's just poor resolution in the source data. It's only a couple of miles across, and the plot looks like it attempted to approximate the coastline with points roughly 1 mile (maybe 2km?) apart.
Another one might be: What's the ratio between the area of the country and the smallest rectangle which bounds the country. This would "punish" countries with protuberances more than ones with "in-cuts", which "feels right" to me.
Actual outlines:
Nauru: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Nauru_ma...
San Marino: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/San_Mari...
Vatican: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Vatican_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sint_Maarten-CIA_WFB_Map....
A similar approach is used in biology to define animal territories: A kernel density estimate is taken of historical animal positions and thresholded, rather than a minimum convex polygon.
Mercator actually would have been a good choice because it preserves local angles. Not sure why you'd be so opposed to it in this case. For this purpose, relative sizes don't matter at all.
And I don't think a local projection would clarify anything. Countries can get pretty big and non-local. If you strive for complete geometric accuracy on the scale of, say, Canada, the idea of a "rectangle" breaks down because there are no parallel lines on Earth, and four right angles don't bring you back to the orientation where you started.
The older ones grew; the newer were planned.
You can see it east-to-west in the USA states' borders.
The state borders, on the other hand, are often quadrilaterals. Perfect scores to Wyoming and Colorado, and near-perfect for many others.
http://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/glad-you-asked/...
Another kink in the souther border: https://www.google.com/maps/@36.988568,-106.87603,12z
Credit to this blog: http://www.howderfamily.com/blog/colorado-not-rectangle/
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-the-zigzag-betwee...
Reagan would never have let this happen. #makeamericarectangularagain
Score = area of the symmetric difference between country and the rectangle maximizing the score.
